


not in what they say (just in who they are)

by mischief7manager



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Families of Choice, Gen, Platonic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 23:21:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14319309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mischief7manager/pseuds/mischief7manager
Summary: "Their marks from their mother are nearly identical: matching stripes of bright grass-green right across mirrored cheekbones, as if she’d made them by brushing away their tears. She would do exactly that when they cried over skinned knees or spilled breakfast, brown thumb for Vax and blue thumb for Vex, before gathering them into a tight hug. “There, there, darling,” she’d murmur into whichever twin’s ear. “It’ll be alright, I promise.”(Soulmarks don’t change when the giver dies. Vex knows this, has been told this, but she can’t help looking at her brother’s cheek when they’re standing among the ashes of their childhood home. In the fading light of the day, the faint green looks more like a half-healed bruise than any sign that they were loved.)"Vox Machina, the marks they carry, and the marks they leave on each other.





	not in what they say (just in who they are)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [True Colors](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2121813) by [lady_ragnell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell). 



> new campaign, new versions of the same feelings about the old campaign lolwhoops
> 
> spoilers through The Thing in 104.

The twins don’t remember giving each other their soulmarks. How could they? They were nine (Vax) and two (Vex) minutes old when it happened. But their mother told them the story over and over when they were small, until they could recite it as perfectly as if they  _ did _ remember.

“You were screaming,” she’d say to Vax, pulling him to her side. “Screaming and screaming, from the second you were born, gods above, you had a set of lungs. Wailing away in the midwife’s arms, and of course nothing I could do to soothe you, since I had to get this one-” a second’s pause to tuck Vex under her other arm, “-out into the world. I was half afraid there was something wrong, you were so upset, even when they gave you to me to hold. But of course-” And here she would look from Vax to Vex and smile. “They got you wrapped up in your blankets and gave you to me, and let me tell you, my darlings, holding two babes at once is  _ not _ a task for the faint of heart-”

“What next, Mama?” Vex would ask, her piping child’s voice tight with excitement, though she’d heard the story a thousand times.

And her mother would smile. “Then, sweet girl,” she’d say, ducking to press a kiss to the top of Vex’s forehead, “you heard your brother crying and you reached out to him, and the second you touched him, he stopped. He missed you, you see, after so long with just the two of you.”

“And now I can’t wait for her to leave me alone!” Vax would always say, and Vex would stick her tongue out at him, and he would reach across their mother to tickle her, and they would dissolve into a three-person pile of laughter and flailing limbs. And when they went to bed that night, Vex would brush her fingers over the ebony-brown splotch on the back of her left hand, and Vax would brush his over the sky-blue splotch on the side of his right bicep, and they’d both smile.

Their marks from their mother are nearly identical: matching stripes of bright grass-green right across mirrored cheekbones, as if she’d made them by brushing away their tears. She would do exactly that when they cried over skinned knees or spilled breakfast, brown thumb for Vax and blue thumb for Vex, before gathering them into a tight hug. “There, there, darling,” she’d murmur into whichever twin’s ear. “It’ll be alright, I promise.”

(Soulmarks don’t change when the giver dies. Vex knows this, has been told this, but she can’t help looking at her brother’s cheek when they’re standing among the ashes of their childhood home. In the fading light of the day, the faint green looks more like a half-healed bruise than any sign that they were loved.)

Syldor doesn’t leave a mark on either of the twins. Vex, at least, actively avoids touching him for a good three months after they’re taken to Syngorn, for fear of getting a mark she doesn’t want, until Vax grabs Syldor’s hand one day, just to see. Nothing happens, and Vex isn’t sure if that’s better or worse than what she imagined.

Syldor doesn’t leave a mark, but years later, Velora does. She hugs them both, unaware or uncaring of her father’s cool disdain, and they realize when she pulls away, her forearms stained brown and blue. Vex and Vax each get a lavender stripe on the backs of their necks. It’s not as bright as their marks for each other, no way it would be, but it’s more than either of them ever expected: to have a new soulmark given by a member of their family.

 

* * *

 

When Pike first meets him, Grog doesn’t have any soulmarks at all.

It’s not encouraged in the herd, he explains to her. At least under Kevdak’s rule, having a map of the people you care about on your skin is seen as a sign of weakness. Like you’re saying to your enemies, “Here’s all my squishy bits, be sure to get them first.” They still show up, sometimes, but they’re almost always covered, kept secret. Grog was lucky not to have any, he says, because it meant there was no one to tie him down. He didn’t owe anything to anyone, and in the herd, that made him strong. 

When he finally faces Kevdak, Grog is covered in soulmarks. He wears them as a badge of honor, his family’s colors spread across his skin in a riotous tapestry, but the most noticeable mark is still (is  _ always _ ) the first mark he ever received: a tiny, perfectly shaped, sunshine-yellow handprint, placed directly over his heart.

 

* * *

 

Scanlan doesn’t realize Kaylie was going out of her way not to touch him until she does it. The sword presses into his skin and then she drops it and she’s in his arms. “Why… Why can’t I do it?” she says, slightly muffled against his chest. “All this time thinking about it and now I can’t do it.”

He says something, something he hopes will make things even a little better (fucking figures the words fail him when he needs them the most) and he realizes, in the second before she pulls away, that the front of his shirt is still open. 

When Kaylie lifts her head, there’s a smear of bright, vibrant pink from her cheekbone to her jaw. Glancing down, he sees a matching shape just over his collarbone, rose-orange like the setting sun. 

“You’re still a scoundrel,” Kaylie says, voice soft. “It’s what’s kept you alive this long.” Her eyes flick down and widen at the fresh mark on his chest. “In some ways, it’s what’s kept me alive this long,” she says, almost to herself. 

Kaylie swallows. “I’ve got a lot to think about.” She’s not looking at him, or the mark. “I’m gonna go for a walk. I need some fresh air.” She sheathes her sword, and she leaves.

Scanlan stands there, a hand pressed against the mark, for a long time.

 

* * *

 

Vampires don’t have souls. This is a fact Vax knows. No creature brought back from beyond the grave in such an unnatural manner can keep their soul. He knows that Silas Briarwood is not a man, that whatever thing he returned to the land of the living as could not be treated as such. Silas Briarwood has no more soul than an undead thrall or necromancer’s plaything.

But he sees the wine red mark of fingers around Lady Delilah’s slender wrist, and he sees the precise same color in a mark on the side of her neck, usually hidden by her high collar, now torn open as she slumps against the cavern wall, a mark in the unmistakable shape of a bite--

And he wonders.

Vax, for his part, sometimes feels he has more soulmarks than he knows what to do with. For so long it was just his mother and his sister, but these days he’s a veritable rainbow, from Grog’s blood red to Gilmore’s (Shaun’s-) royal purple. Vex makes fun of him for his monochromatic wardrobe, but why would he need more than black in his clothes when all the colors that matter are painted across his skin? 

(When the Raven Queen returns him to the land of the living to carry out his final vengeance, he is bare of all marks but Hers.)

 

* * *

 

Of all of Vox Machina, Percy might have the most soulmarks.

It makes sense. His family was large, after all, and even if the marks from his siblings were not the deep, dark intensity of, say, Vex and Vax’s marks for each other, they were still  _ there _ . His siblings and his parents left their marks on him, still visible long after they’re gone. 

He has many marks, but he didn’t show them for a very long time. Part of that was suspicion, especially in the early days of what would become Vox Machina, but it was a tradition carried over from long before the Briarwoods ever came into his life. Among the nobility, at least in Whitestone, soulmarks were considered a family affair; they encouraged bonding within the family, but soliciting or receiving them from others could lead to tension, especially when there were political alliances or marriages to consider.

(There’s a reason everyone wore gloves.)

He was nine when he realized what that might mean. It was winter, and Ludwig, then barely more than a toddler, had fallen ill. The sickness has spread through most of the village and castle, but they had all recovered easily enough. Not so with Ludwig. Always a sickly child, he spent days in fevered dreaming, and on the third day the clerics of Pelor called the family into his sickroom to make their farewells, convinced he would not last the night. 

It was the most disheveled Percy ever saw his mother. Johanna de Rolo was a woman of poise and composure, in all things, but that night she was above all, a mother, terrified of losing her son. As such, she had not taken her usual pains to prepare her appearance. Her hair, in particular, caught Percy’s attention. While usually his mother styled it in such a way that it framed her face, falling elegantly around her shoulders, this night she had swept it up haphazardly, tied back with a ribbon. This meant that when she leaned across Ludwig’s bed, taking him into her trembling arms, Percy caught a glimpse of a mark on her face, just underneath her jaw. 

In that moment, Percy immediately noticed two things: one, the mark was the vibrant color of the touch left by a soulmate; two, the mark was not of the color left by his father. 

He didn’t dare approach his mother about it. Even at his age, he knew soulmarks were deeply personal, and to inquire about something so sensitive from his  _ mother _ ? All good breeding in him rebelled. He did, however, broach the topic with Vesper. Then a wise and world-weary eleven, she told him, “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the family name. It’s all for the de Rolos, you understand, Percival, even if it means giving up something you really want.”

He listened to her words, but he doesn’t understand them until he’s much older. And by that point, he’s rather given up trying to be a good de Rolo.

Of all his blood kin, Percy’s darkest mark is from Cassandra. He got it when he was five, nearly six, just a few days after she was born. Each of them was brought into the nursery in turn to meet their sister, and Percy, the story goes, was fascinated by her and immediately stuck a hand into her crib to poke at her. Before the nursemaid could do anything, baby Cassandra reached out and wrapped a tiny fist around his finger. The mark grows as he does, as his does on her, but he carries it with him: a smoke grey handprint on the index finger of his right hand.

(He realizes the irony, of course. Her mark on his trigger finger. A reminder of her every time he chooses to shoot, to kill. Every time he uses the horror he created in the name of avenging what was done to her. He wonders if she felt the same, his mark, the purple-grey-blue of a rolling thunderhead, of a bruise too new and deep to heal, on her hand as it wrapped around the hilt of her sword, as she drove it into Lady Delilah’s chest.)

 

* * *

 

Taryon Darrington always wears long sleeves. Even in the heat of hell, he keeps his cuffs crisp and buttoned. It’s not until they’re back in Whitestone, giddy on survival and ale and being back together, that he pushes his sleeves up enough to reveal the cobalt blue mark on the inside of his wrist. “Lawrence,” he says. “Larry. Larry and Tary,” and if any of the others catch him brushing a shaking finger over the mark, they are polite enough not to mention it.

 

* * *

 

Pike has a bunch of soulmarks. There’s Pawpaw Wilhand’s golden light on her cheek, of course, and Grog’s blood red across her palm, and all the rest of her family. Most of them are hand or fingerprints, which is how soulmarks are for most people. She has Vax’s brown hand on her left wrist, and Vex’s blue knuckles where she punched her right shoulder. Percy’s mark stained on the underside of three of her fingers, her corresponding mark on his temple over the site of a long-healed injury. Keyleth’s amber in a line down her forearm, where the druid had dragged a single finger, just to see if it would take. All fairly typical places, remarkable only for the intensity of color.

All except Scanlan. Scanlan, who, for whatever reason, had been wearing gloves when first they met, leaving Pike with a bright pink imprint of a kiss on the back of her hand. They’d all laughed, at different points in their history, at how Scanlan looked as though he’d donned the most horrifying shade of yellow lipstick, but the man himself never complained. He wore it as a badge of honor, citing it as proof of their love, that she and him were simply meant to be.

After he leaves, she can barely stand to look at the mark. It’s too bright, too obvious, too much a reminder of what he said and what she didn’t say, what she failed to do. What she should have done. Pike throws herself into the efforts in Emon, into healing and cleaning and rebuilding, and it’s only at night that she lets herself speak into the earring, thumb rubbing over the back of her hand, as though her voice and her touch will be enough to bring him back.

 

* * *

 

One of the first things Keyleth learns on her Aramente is how goddamn weird everybody else in the world gets about soulmarks. 

Because for the Ashari, right, it’s actually not that big of a deal. Like, sure, a super deep or bright mark might mean your “soulmate,” whatever the fuck  _ that  _ means, but honestly, isn’t it better to know upfront if somebody is going to be important to you? The whole process seems like it should make everything about interpersonal relationships so much easier.

Of course, then she meets Vox Machina, none of whom have ever made anything easier a single day in their whole fucking lives, and she has to revise that opinion.

It’s just- Keyleth doesn’t have a lot of marks, okay? She has her dad, and her mom, and that’s it. So when she meets these people and starts, you know,  _ touching  _ them, and all these marks start appearing and they’re all,  _ all _ of them, deeper and brighter than any she’s ever seen before-

She thinks she can be forgiven for freaking out. Just a little bit.

She comes to accept the marks, of course. Of everyone in the group, she probably has the most visible at any given time, thanks to her relative lack of armor and her favored fashion of sleeveless shirts. It’s a badge of honor, one she wears alongside her Ashari markings and, later, her Headmaster’s tattoos. Here, inked into her skin, is the proof that somebody was important to her, and she to them.

Here, she thinks in the years and decades and centuries to come, is the proof that she was loved. 

**Author's Note:**

> this has been sitting in my wip folder so long, guys, y'all don't even know, i published this in the public library, that's how ready i was for it to be Done


End file.
